NEW YORK -- If you ask Jessye Norman, the international opera star, where's she from, she proudly mentions Augusta, Ga., which since 2003 has been home to the Jessye Norman School for the Arts.

But if you ask Norman, 68, where she grew up -- in the sense of coming of age -- her answer is more global:

"Berlin," as in Germany.

Which, she says, is part of the reason she's written her first book, a memoir, Stand Up Straight and Sing! (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

The title comes from her mother's admonition, back "when I was 7 or 8 and a Brownie and going on stage to sing Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam or something like that."

And even today, 26 years after her mom's death, Norman says she can hear her mother's voice "whenever I start slumping a little bit."

Dressed in a long flowing black dress, and an olive-green jacket and blouse, she sits up straight at an interview about her book.

She wrote it to celebrate her parents, and what it was like to grow up "loved and sheltered" in the segregated south and to go on to sing for presidents and prime ministers, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela.

She's not one to be defined easily by others. She devotes four pages of her 316-page memoir to complaints about a 60 Minutes profile of her from 1991, which she considered too personal and less than respectful.

She keeps her private life very private. But she's more expansive on what influenced and inspired her.

Jessye Norman(Photo: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

One turning point came in Berlin when she was a 23-year-old graduate student at the University of Michigan. She was invited to Germany's largest opera house to sing the soprano role of Elisabeth, who's "pure as the driven snow," as Norman puts it, in Wagner's Tannhauser, about the struggle between profane and sacred love.

After the second act, the artistic director "came to me and said, 'This is going very well and I think I'd like to engage you to sing at our opera house.' And I said, 'But I haven't sung Act 3.' "

She ended up living in Berlin for three years.

"There was so much I didn't understand about the world," she recalls. "To go from the segregated South to a city that was divided (between West and East Berlin) in a country that was divided, I saw all these parallels and ironies."

As a child in Augusta, she and four siblings were taught "this was our country too, that we were as good as anyone else, but we would have to work harder to prove that."

Her mother, Janie,was a teacher who quit teaching to raise her children. Her father, Silas, was a mechanic on the Georgia Railroad who, after being shut out of an all-white union, became a salesman for a black-owned life insurance company.

At Marshall's funeral in 1993, Norman sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic. A year later, she sang Schubert's Ave Maria at the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

As a performer, Norman likes to "break ranks" beyond classical opera. In 2009, she recorded and performed Sacred Ellington, in "the very same place the Duke himself performed his sacred music concerts" at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan.